I see the point why switches in every room are a maintenance issue. However, these smart devices, would they saturate the network so much that I need direct cable from each of them to the server closet?

Who’s to say in a few years you even WANT to connect these devices to your network? What if they aren’t ethernet at all but can still run over twisted pair cabling? Or maybe you end up wishing you had some fiber, or something else?

Independent runs isn’t about saturation, these aren’t gig traffic devices. It’s about management and flexibility. There are just things you can’t do with a bunch of cheap pocket switches.

For more budget friendly recommendations, the unifi switches are great but expensive while used Aruba 2920 POE’s are $130 on eBay. Unifi UAP pro can handle 50 devices on 1 AP, most houses can be covered by 2 maybe 3.

Axis cameras are big money bad value and good for commercial use if you’re going Exaqvision over Blueiris, Dahua are great value and can do color night vision now for much less. There are some solid Amcrest offerings around too. Avoid wireless cameras over wired.

I wouldn’t recommend buying wifi devices without matter support at this point. Thread solves congestion issues. Zigbee might be 915 or 2.4ghz but your demanding devices will run on the 5ghz anyways.

Good point on the home theater! You can run all your speaker wires now. Don’t forget power for smart door locks!

Don’t run cat wire, run conduit in the walls. In 20 years you might want to fish something completely different. Put conduit to every room and every thing you think might need it and you can EASILY put whatever low voltage you want through.

For your electrical, just do all 4 conductor instead of 3. Someday you might want it and it’s a modest increase in cost. Run 10g where you require 12, run 12g where you require 14. You waste less electricity in the walls losing less to heat.

No, you shouldn’t run 1 wire to a room and a little pocket switch for each room. That’s an IT nightmare. Have a closet with homeruns. Have all your POE on ONE switch and you can have a battery backup on it, you can MANAGE your devices there. Pocket switches are last resort in any deployment as an afterthought, not a forethought.

You’re gonna eventually “saturate your house with wireless” Just plan now around a few good accesspoints.

It’s all going to move to matter and thread in the next few years if they can get the spec together but you should design around flexibility.